Skeletons of the Vongola
by Nightsmoke
Summary: It's a boss's job to know everything about their family. Even if he doesn't want to.


All characters © Amano Akira

_Summary:_ It's a boss's job to know everything about their family. Even if he doesn't want to.

I was experimenting with mixing and alternating humor and dark.

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_**Skeletons of the Vongola**_

Tsuna knows more about his family than they think he does. This is because of the little-known fact that Tsuna can hold his liquor better than anyone in the Vongola save for Reborn and Shamal. He doesn't know why; his BMI is quite low and his tolerance to other substances is rather weak. But with any kind of alcohol, Tsuna finds he can drink it like water and remain unaffected. Still, he always dreads those mafia parties, which aren't really parties at all but just required meetings with lots of sake and Pinot Grigio.

On one hand he can retain control over his senses, but on the other he has to watch his family make complete asses of themselves and then plead amnesia the next day. The mental scarring and disturbing secrets better left unshared are esoteric things between Tsuna, Reborn, and the good doctor. Putting all humor aside, Tsuna almost wishes he _could_ have amnesia. Sometimes it was possible to know a little too much about your guardians, and sometimes that knowledge was such a burden to be trusted with. It also made Tsuna uncomfortable to go about the day knowing their most surreptitious secrets.

The things that often escaped intoxicated lips ranged from amusing, pitiful, to downright disturbing. Reborn would take in all that was said, adding it to his cache of knowledge with no more than a nod or a slight frown. Shamal would grin like a loon and cackle mirthfully at the drunken confessions, but for all his antics he would never utter a word of them. Tsuna knew that he was too dedicated to the Vongola to carelessly spill such information.

At those Vongola gatherings Tsuna gathered plenty; more than was needed.

He was perhaps the only one save for Bianchi who knew about Gokudera's hypochondria. When Gokudera was six, he had seen Shamal nearly murder another man without even lifting a finger. He had only been six, and someone from some distant, unimportant mafia family had tried to rob the Gokudera estate, he remembered. Normally that would have been something taken care of by the senior Gokudera, but his father had been away at the time. Shamal had been watching over Gokudera and his sister. Perhaps Shamal had _wanted_ Gokudera to see that. Why else would he have gone all out on a single mafia-don?

Gokudera hadn't specified, but Tsuna guessed that it hadn't been pretty.

Over the next seven years, Gokudera had seen men bleed to death from their ears, cough up the lining of their stomachs, have their veins engorged and explode, develop full-body gangrene, choke on their own tongue, and a variety of other graphic deaths caused by Shamal not even having to lift a finger. Was it any wonder Gokudera feared illness, after seeing all of that?

Tsuna knows that Gokudera is terrified of biological warfare, and that he regards Shamal with a combination of the utmost disgust, fear...and respect.

Even his strongest of guardians became weak under the influence. Because of this, Tsuna also knows that Mukuro is perhaps one of the few people in the mafia who fears death. This is because the man's seen the six paths to Hades, and he's seen that there _is_ a hell. He doesn't intend to go there anytime soon.

This proves to be one of the more unsettling things Mukuro has told him, not only because the man practically used time and space as his local playground, but because there was another world besides this one that Mukuro had absolutely no control over.

Ryohei's problems were, like the rest of him, simple. Mostly he blathered on about women, money, his training. But on one occasion when Ryohei had been especially drunk, he had told Tsuna something Tsuna had a hard time believing simply because it was Ryohei they were talking about.

Boxing in high school sometimes had physical requirements, including weight. Tsuna did not want to even consider the words 'anorexia' and 'Ryohei' in the same sentence, but after years of knowing him it was easy to forget that Ryohei always took things to the extremes.

Yamamoto is simple-minded as well, for the most part, but his mental state is nowhere near as sound as Ryohei's. Tsuna knew that for all the smiles and laughs, there was a little...something going on upstairs. When he wasn't attempting to sing the Japanese national anthem backwards, a drunk Yamamoto claimed that he was slightly attracted to the Varia's second-in-command, Superbi Squalo.

But the one thing about Yamamoto that Tsuna knows, and is both impressed and unsettled by, is that when Yamamoto kills he actually _enjoys_ the job. He saw it, like he did everything else, as a game. It almost made you question the man's interpretation of reality. Tsuna thought it best if he didn't ask further, for the sake of his own weal.

The Vongola seemed to overlook, forget, or just blatantly ignore the normal consumption laws. Lambo was only fifteen, but the family tradition insisted that alcohol was a cultural asset to the mafia, therefore he drank without a qualm from the others.

It was Lambo who was the least tolerant, ironically, giving his mantra of "tolerate" and his extreme endurance to lightning. He was still only a kid, though. It was after a few glasses of wine that Lambo came to Tsuna, telling him about these strange, sexy dreams he had begun having about Ipin. Sometimes he would go into detail about these dreams and Tsuna would listen, bear it, and tell his Thunder guardian with a smile that it was all a completely normal stage of puberty.

Chrome was a little stronger, but not by much. The boldness that she often kept hidden under a quiet, timid mien came out with drink. She craved attention and affection from the men like no other, and had to constantly remind them, stumbling around as red as a tomato, that she was a 34 DD. Tsuna knew that Chrome was the most mercurial under alcohol, and that her moods would rapidly shift like the changing weather. But, he also thought that he could understand her better when she was intoxicated, since he could get a little more insight on where she had come from.

He knew that she had been beaten and molested by her father since the age of nine.

Out of them all, Hibari was the worst. Kusakabe had mentioned that he was..._abstemious_ in his drinking, which in other words meant that he could no more hold his liquor than he could smile. Tsuna preferred to know as little as possible about his cloud guardian, just because things were simpler that way and it helped maintain the stable, peaceful relationship they had.

Tsuna couldn't say he was surprised, but he was dismally shocked to learn that back in their Namimori days, Hibari had accidentally killed a student one time. He had been fifteen, inexperienced, and had literally bitten to death. The principal had charged him with third-degree murder and the student's parents had sued the school.

Nobody had ever known about this incident since it had never been publicized. It had actually been Reborn, a sloshed Hibari recalled, who had convinced the principal to drop his charges and to pay the school for the costs as long as things were kept confidential. Tsuna had no trouble believing this part since Reborn could be one _hell_ of a coercer.

.

If things weren't bad enough, Tsuna also knows things he doesn't necessarily want to know about people who _weren't_ present at the Vongola gatherings, via the people who were. Most of these came from Mukuro, who not only enjoyed playing with peoples' minds but their dreams as well. Tsuna had no desire to know that Joshima Ken showers only once a week, or that Dino uses his whips for more than just fighting.

The little bits of knowledge that make Tsuna uncomfortable in a different way usually come from Ryohei, who once told him when Kyoko had switched from pads to tampons. It's all Tsuna can do to nod sympathetically and dissuade Shamal from asking for more clarification.

Tsuna also knows various things about the Varia via Mukuro, Dino, and Yamamoto, mostly. He knows that Squalo only shouts everything because he has partial hearing loss. He knows that Lussuria wears prescription sunglasses because the eyes behind them are filmy and scratched from a childhood injury. The injury, coincidentally, was maternal abuse, and is the reason why Lussuria can never love a woman.

Along with the discomfort of knowing a little too much about the Vongola, Tsuna has to also put up with the drunken speculations of his _famiglia._ Rumors and crassly-made remarks that would have never been voiced sober (generally) were shamelessly thrown out in the open.

They were creative, Tsuna had to give them that, and sometimes rather colorful.

Fuuta's book also ranked sex drive, Lambo had slurred on such occasion.

The one time Tsuna can remember that Reborn had almost shed his stoic listener's face, coughing to hide a chuckle, was when Ryohei and Gokudera had gotten into argument concerning the number of times Lal Mirch had kicked Colonello in the groin.

There were also random musings on whether or not Levi Volta had gotten his lip ring caught in anything, Bel on his use of laxatives on anyone else in the Varia, and what the Cervello really looked like under their masks.

If Tsuna had to hear the theory that Basil was the hermaphrodite lovechild of Oregano and Iemitsu one more time he thought he would scream.

* * *

So Tsuna knows more about his family than they think he does. Whether it is because they get too drunk or (most likely) due to a little interference on Shamal's part, none of them remember any of the things they had told him the next morning. But Tsuna never forgets.

He walks around knowing, in many cases, the deepest, darkest secrets of his many family members, and he accepts them. Tsuna knows that it is his job, as the _Vongola Decimo_, to treasure these secrets and to keep them safe. It is not the knowledge that creates the power, but what one does with it. Tsuna takes their information, embracing it, realizing that it is not a burden so much as an opening into their hearts, and learns to love his family for their secrets from the bottom of his.


End file.
